| This is a poem that I wrote over a long period of time, in fragments, and stitched together quickly. After I wrote the opening of the poem--radishes, car, cemetery--I didn't know where to go. The headstone opened the door to talking about the father, so I pulled that diner scene from an earlier failed poem. The father's wrist seemed like another potential hinge, and I remembered these lines I'd written maybe ten, twelve years earlier about his watch. Once I had the watch, with its tiny spinning gears, I thought of my bike, which I had been riding obsessively since my dad died. And suddenly I had a poem about grief, compulsion, recalibration. It's one of my favorites in the book, probably because I didn't know what I was doing until it was almost done. | 
